WaterBridge Ventures

🎉 2025: Pookie, we can't wait to hang out with you. Season's Greetings and a very Happy New Year, from us to all of you! Year-end Recap: WaterBridge Portfolio Picture At a Glance 🥇 Atlan secured $105M in Series C; ranked #1 in data governance by Forrester and TechTarget 🎈 Chalo celebrates 10th anniversary; wins World Economic Forum's New Champion Award ✨ magicpin doubles its annual revenue; becomes the largest food delivery seller app on the Open Network For Digital Commerce (ONDC) ✅ CityMall doubles down on its product mix, listed by Inc42 Media in "Unicorns of Tomorrow" 💊 Pocketpills cements its position as Canada's #1 online pharmacy; revenue run rate grows 2X ⚖️ bijnis is becoming indispensable for small factories in enhancing capacity utilization  🪇 Eloelo ranks as the #1 Entertainment app on Google Play 🪜 ZET delivers full-stack credit-building platform for 600M+ new-to/ low-on-credit customers 🤖 Nymble completes shipping its first batch of autonomous robots; customer love pours in ⚱️ Yellow Metal crosses ₹400Cr in disbursements; to expand credit offerings in Tier III+ markets 🧢 CBREX wraps 2024 with 6 customers at $100K+ ACV via its AI-powered recruiter OS 🐝 Loopworm commercialises its plant and commences EU exports WaterBridge Portfolio in the News: 📺 Priya Singh on building products centred around customers, on ET NOW 👜 Divya Chethan shares her journey of building CBREX at SheShines by Winpe  🏆 Chunky Shah recognised in BWFinance40U40 WaterBridge Insights: 🎙️ Launching Season 4 of That One Idea with Trampoline  🎩 Insights: Gig Economy goes mainstream 🗼 Insights: India's burgeoning middle class reshaping the travel narrative 🎮 Anjali Sosale as a Speaker on the panel at IGDC 2024 🌟 WaterBridge's Rev It Up is back in Jan 2025! 👉 Register here: https://lu.ma/d7gddgmx Manish Ashish

CBREX enters the Special Education sector in the US that's slated to grow at an unprecedented rate in the next decade. If you are a recruitment agency specializing in the US Education sector, mail us your queries at tara@cbrex.co or sign-up on CBREX at https://lnkd.in/g2i7JCTN #SpecialEdHiring #USEducationSector #SupplyRecruiterUS

Wayfair received a ton of love for its Home & Decor products from its customers in the UK. So much so, that it was the only competitor that Amazon tracked. 💡 That did not happen by accident. Amazon is the pioneer of churning out innovation at pace and scale. During the period Abhik Ghosh was at Amazon, its market cap grew 6X. 🔝 They took customer obsession to a whole new level—designing and delivering products that wowed customers at every touchpoint. On the face of it, there was no reason for Amazon to be intrigued with Wayfair, which was just setting up shop in Europe in 2021. Digging deeper, Abhik uncovered that - 📦 Wayfair's verticalised focus helped them perfect the heavy and bulky deliveries (sofas, beds, wardrobes) exactly the way customers wanted 🏭 Suppliers are also customers in the marketplace model that Wayfair operates in. Being supplier-obsessed was something which Abhik picked up from Wayfair ❌ For Amazon, this category was just a rounding error in the larger scheme of things, so it never got the attention that it deserves Today, Amazon is the 4th most valued company in the world by market capitalisation. Wayfair's market cap of $6B is a rounding error in front of Amazon's massive $2.5T. Yet, customers preferred Wayfair as their go-to destination for home and interiors, over the goliath Amazon. Our thesis behind Trampoline was to empower independent furniture retailers in the world to take on the big-box giants. To uncover more such nuggets, tune in to our podcast with Trampoline. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx Anjali Manish Ashish

Customers like these ❤️

Growing up in a Navy family, Abhik's childhood ambitions centred around getting into the Indian Navy ⚓. Fast-forward a decade—Abhik was a bar raiser at Amazon. What led to this pivot? 🎙️ Episode 1 of #ThatOneIdea Season 4 (https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx) has Abhik, Anushka and Varun, the co-founders of Trampoline, speaking to Anjali Sosale, Partner at WaterBridge Ventures about the numerous pivots and transitions in their lives that led them to start up in the cross-border home and decor space. Abhik's grandparents had immigrated to Madhya Pradesh from Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan). His parents had to walk 10–12 km to go to school, raising their son to join the Indian Navy. Abhik was born in Bombay. He spent his childhood moving from one city to the other. After a brief stay in Germany, Abhik's family hopped from Cochin to Vishakhapatnam, before finally settling in Delhi. 🏃♂️ As a kid, Abhik was extremely outdoorsy—spending most of his day with his cantonment outside the house. Academics never had much of an importance. After his graduation, Abhik joined GE's rotational stint as a management trainee. He learnt as much as he could across multiple departments. Despite being people-focused, the slow-moving nature of the corporate behemoth forced him to look out. ⁉️ He wanted to try his hand at entrepreneurship. He had no formal training in business, and nobody in his extended family had any exposure to running one. His first startup in contract manufacturing shut down within a few months. His second attempt was around recreating the success that knowledge centres in India had experienced during the KPO boom. Abhik then went on to pursue his MBA from INSEAD. ⚡For a kid who grew up in the bubble of cantonment upbringing, attending a class with students from 79 other countries was a first. It was a melting pot of cultures and myriad opinions. Israelis sat next to Palestinians. Indians sat next to Pakistanis. But Abhik realised that if one left their baggage outside the classroom, consensus could often be drawn on most topics. Armed with this learning, he joined Amazon in London. During that stint, Abhik - 🛫 Learnt to look at the bigger picture from 30K ft above, while being abreast of the nuanced details 🌅 Saw how innovation can happen at pace 💰 Went from being a glorified coffee boy (at this second startup) to managing a £60M P&L We're proud to partner with Trampoline as it scales to become the go-to option for independent retailers in the UK, delighting them with sharp product pricing, breadth and depth of catalogue, and superior customer experience. Full podcast 👉 https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx Manish Ashish

Varun's father was an acclaimed cricketer 🏏. 👨🔬 But when he saw Varun playing cricket, he thought it would be better for him to pursue chemistry instead—his mother's side of the trade 🎙️ Episode 1 of #ThatOneIdea Season 4 (https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx) with the co-founders of Trampoline reveals a lot more about their long-winding personal and professional journeys leading to 2-3X Bharat Vapsi, before donning their entrepreneurial hats. 🧪 Varun grew up in Pune. His mother was a chemistry teacher. Shunned by cricket, Varun dedicated his efforts to excelling in chemistry. 🥇 He graduated with a Distinction in Chemistry from Fergusson College, and went on to pursue a Master's in Organic Chemistry at the University of Sussex, where he received the Chancellors Scholarship for academic excellence. Varun started his career at Bharat Serums and Vaccines Limited as a medical representative. He went from clinic to clinic, selling medicines to doctors. It was a tiring activity, waiting for long hours outside crowded clinics to get a few seconds of facetime with a doctor, before knocking on the doors of the next one. But this stint taught him to shun his ego at work, and figure out how to learn and get things done in the absence of any formal training. He got to travel all across the country, where he got exposed to a wide array to cultures, which shaped him up for his return to academics to pursue a management degree from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Varun returned to India to rejoin Bharat Serums - his Bharat(x2) Vapsi incident # 2. In 2015, he joined Practo, leading their online pharmacy practice. He eventually moved to Amazon Luxembourg as the category lead for Office & Print products, followed by Physical Retail. Amazon, the connecting thred between the three co-founders, taught him to: 🌟 Be ultra customer-obsessed and deliver a phenomenal experience to them at every touchpoint 🪡 Embrace frugality, yet be uncomprising on the quality of output 🎈 Have fun at work while delivering peak performance At Trampoline, Varun is responsible for sourcing, setting up, and managing the complex supply chain that ships high-craftsmanship home interior and decor products to small independent retailers in the UK. Cricket was his first love. Trampoline is his Ikigai. Full podcast 👉 https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx Manish Ashish Anjali

Swiggy and Zomato each engage ~450K delivery partners monthly. In fact, 20-30% of India’s gig workers are engaged in hyperlocal and e-commerce deliveries. The gig economy has transformed the way Indians work, move and live. From ride-sharing (Ola/ BluSmart), to household services (UC) to freelance digital work (Upwork, Freelancer), various sectors contribute to our burgeoning gig economy. 🌐 Snapshot of the Gig Landscape Out of India’s ~550M workforce, about 8M (< 2%) are gig workers. This figure is projected to 3x to 24M in 3-4 years and 11x to 90M in 8-10 years. Comparatively, China has 200M gig workers which comprise about 27% of China’s ~734M workforce. Undoubtedly, India’s gig workforce is set to explode in the coming decade. 🚴♂️ State of the gig workers in India: The gig economy extends beyond just tier-1 or metropolitan areas, which represent only 35% of the gig workforce. There has also been a significant increase in demand for gig work in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Urban gig workers involved in hyperlocal deliveries typically earn between ₹15,000 and ₹20,000 ($188 to $250) per month, or $3K p.a. At WaterBridge, we estimate that about 206M households today are earning less than $6K p.a. Given that gig economy offers a fairer and more structured alternative to instability and income insecurity, there is ample room for this tier to grow. 💡 Platforms enabling Gig Economy: Hard To Scale? While numerous startups have aimed to address the challenges of human resource management functions in gig, only a handful of startups such as job search platforms like Apna and Goodworker, work fulfillment platforms like Awign, to high-velocity discovery platforms like WorkIndia and Vahan, have seen some success. Many players who have tried building blue-collar worker marketplaces have struggled to achieve PMF (either acqui-hired/ shut-down). Platforms for freelancers and small tasks hasn’t seen much success either. 📈 What’s Next? There’s over 25%+ attrition rates today in the gig sector. At a platform level, the value chain of the gig economy (discovery to matchmaking, training, upskilling, retention and replacement) continues to have missing pieces. Multiple verticalised models are starting to emerge (eg. Wishlink democratizing influencer marketing). There’s further scope for startups to build platforms enabling services for gig workers (eg. insurance) . At a category level, while hyperlocal delivery (e-commerce/ q-commerce), personal and at-home services, have seen significant success, it’ll be interesting to witness which new sectors can be built upon India’s flourishing gig economy. While some startups in categories like laundromats and at-home chefs have already tried and burnt their hand, others like petcare found some success eg. Wag! in the US popularised its on-demand dog-walking service ($84M revenue). If you're a founder building in this sector, please reach out to abhinav@waterbridge.vc ! Anjali | Manish | Ashish

Anushka is the brains behind Trampoline's mesmerising collections that have drawn so much love from retailers in the UK. But if you ask her to assemble an outfit, she might be a disaster. 🎙️ Tune in to Episode 1 of #ThatOneIdea Season 4 (https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx) with Abhik, Anushka and Varun, the co-founders of cross-border B2B home decor platform Trampoline, speaking to Anjali Sosale, Partner at WaterBridge Ventures. Anushka grew up in Delhi in a Parsi/Odiya family. Her father was a senior advocate, and her mother was at the UN. Expectedly, her home was a melting pot of cultures and experiences. 👩🎨 Academics had immense importance in her life. Equal encouragement was doled out to the pursuit of interests and passion. For Anushka, it was always the love for the arts. 🎨 Her definition of a perfect day back then was to bunk school to participate in art competitions. Soon, her phone would be flooded with images of home decor, and she would spend hours with the Architectural Digest and any other interior design magazine she could find. 💪 Over a period of time, this became muscle memory. Those were indicators that Anushka's life decisions would be driven more by her passion than by set societal norms, intermittently dotted by bursts of academic brilliance and cross-cultural exposure. Anushka was a Merit Scholar at the University of Mumbai, graduating First Class with Distinction. In 2010, she joined Association for Stimulating Know-how (ASK) to work on resettlement and rehabilitation, CSR and skills development—a role that took her to Bangladesh and Cambodia. After graduating from ESADE (again, as a Merit Scholar), Anushka spent a few years at Arla Foods, managing P&L of different categories across Denmark, UK and Qatar. ✅ At Trampoline, this self-taught designer had her skills validated with immense love and appreciation from customers for Trampoline's craftsmanship. Today, Anushka is focused on forecasting trends, and ramping up the depth and breadth of her collection, in line with the selection and aesthetic that retailers in the UK prefer. Stay tuned to hear more about Abhik and Varun's childhood! Full podcast 👉 https://lnkd.in/gTGVbggx Manish Ashish

This year with World Economic Forum is even more special as Chalo won the New Champions Award for “Digital Innovation.” ❤️ This is a true validation of our meaningful work and kudos to our team who is passionate and have amazing grit. But more than recognition, it reinforced my intrinsic motivation to contribute to society and make a tangible impact. Their mission “improving the state of the world” deeply resonates with me, and this journey has been transformative. To mention the Captain of the ship Julia (Bouron) Devos whose boundless energy, even after long days just inspired me. During dinner also, she was meeting groups and asking “how was your learning for today, do you have inputs and how will you implement this in your org/life - that’s how great leaders are - they have-untiring attitude! Her team Roberta Alimonda and Srivani Chatti (she/her) Yu Tung Cheng and others have unwavering dedication and commitment to live the same mission in their heart… Meeting Professor Sheena Iyengar this year was unforgettable—her “choice map” and unique problem-solving approaches challenged my thinking and inspired me to do more. Conversations with leaders like Marc Hauser and Betta Maggio expanded my perspective on having hope as an anchor of life, and provoked me to think “what will be my legacy to give it to the world.” I learnt from María López-Escorial Associate Professor of Social Impact, that how to be humble, low profile and still make deep impact. And so many inspiring leaders Henrik Stamm Kristensen Henrik Werdelin Sabina Jasinska James Rawson Sahil Chawla Teguh Gumelar António Costa Margarida Saragoca and many more. Last but not the least, my fellow winners of the most prestigious award of New Champions community : Marc Z. Aïcha Goudiaby @pedro lietano Paula Feliciano Viegas congratulations to you all of you ♥️🎉 These moments and people have fueled my journey, reminding me of the responsibility I carry. The work isn’t done—there’s so much more to achieve, and I am more committed than ever. As Chalo’s mission “Let’s Make Travel Better for Everyone” and impact 100 million lives by 2028 with digitisation and sustainability 🧡 Mohit Dubey Vinayak Bhavnani Dhruv Chopra ♥️ #newchampions #WEF #betterworld #chalo #bringthechange #transporttechnology #publicmobility #massmobility